Heaven Café

May we all meet in heaven café

writing for eternity

— Natalie Goldberg

 (dedication, Writing Down the Bones)

I sit in Heaven Café

with my friends Leah and Jennie,

writing for eternity

at this time on this date

in our own places.

Today the café is called La Vela.

It has fake stucco orange walls,

a fake clay pot — half a pot —

jutting from one as if embedded,

and framed photos labelled Italia.

The long black is stewed and bitter,

the muffin fell into bits

when I touched it, leaking

melted butter sauce on my purple shirt.

Heaven has strange manifestations

sometimes, I think as the noise

of Sunnyside Shopping Centre surrounds me,

the cacophony I often tune out

suddenly strident, many-faceted.

Someone is banging metal on metal

rhythmically, purposefully, as if working.

Doors slam, machinery hums

in a constant background,

loud music blares from speakers —

different tunes from different outlets —

and a monologue resonates

through the microphone,

its manufacturedly cheerful note

blurring indecipherably.

People move constantly up and down the ramp,

round and round the circular floors:

a spinning kaleidoscope, never still.

11 o'clock arrives. I shudder in relief

and prepare to depart. But then

I look again and see

Jennie's dark head somewhere in Auckland

bent over as she writes rapidly,

a sideways tilt as she chews her pen

and ponders the landscape half-denuded of trees;

Leah's fair curls in Haifa,

head similarly bent, at a corner table

amongst a talkative crowd

of crones with auburn perms

and faint dark moustaches,

and somewhere in the distance

the sound of guns.

‘Heaven is where the heart is.’

Or is that home?

Our hearts are on the page as we write and write.

Home is a notebook, home is a poem,

home is each other, faithfully meeting,

wondering how to create for eternity,

and keeping our hands moving.


Posted for Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft at dVerse.
I've been working on this one for 10 years! Any ideas how to improve it?